About John Kiriakou

John Kiriakou is a former CIA analyst and
case officer, a former senior investigator for the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, and former counterterrorism consultant. He was involved in critical
counterterrorism missions following the terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001, but refused to be trained in so-called “enhanced interrogation
techniques.” and Kiriakou never authorized or engaged in these techniques.

Kiriakou left the CIA in March 2004, serving as a senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
and as a senior intelligence advisor to Committee Chairman Senator John Kerry. He wrote The
Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror, and worked as an
intelligence consultant.

In 2007, Kiriakou in an interview with ABC
News, became the first former CIA officer to confirm that the agency
waterboarded detainees and label waterboarding as torture – official US policy approved at the highest levels of the government. The
government started investigating Kiriakou immediately, five years later finally succeeding in piecing
together enough information to criminally prosecute him. He became the sixth
whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act.

He reported to federal prison in
Loretto, Pennsylvania on February 28, 2013, to begin serving his
sentence, where he continued to speak out in a series of "Letters from
Loretto". He was released from prison in February 2015.

Constitutional conventions: best practice

Whistleblower John Kiriakou explains why he and fellow-whistlebower Thomas Drake are committed to alerting their fellow Americans to a dangerous surveillance and war system designed to monitor their every activity. 31-minute video Interview.

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